A Treacherous Thing
by Lasgalendil
Summary: In the shadow of Fear Night Brisby finds a friend in a camp counselor who encourages her to excel. She receives a Wayne Enterprises scholarship and resolves to leave her family behind. But Gotham City, secret sins and the long-reaching fingers of unintended consequence turn her American Dream into an Arkham Nightmare.
1. Chapter 1

Let me tell you a story.

My story. Gotham's story. A Tale of Two Cities. The best of times, the worst of times, so inseparable and entwined I can't tell the two apart even now. I grew up in Gotham City, and if you'd grown up there too during those darkening days you'd know that the half-life of a horrible childhood is forever.

You have to understand: I'm not a bad person. But after Shannon died and Paula pulled away and I watched my mother and father fall further and further apart I just wanted out. Away. To Escape. Wayne Enterprises and my scholarship were everything. I had to be perfect. I had to be independent. I had to break free. I caught a glimpse of hope, a way out of Gotham and the pregnancies and drugs and drudgery that surrounded me and my peers and I clawed towards it no matter how much or who it hurt. I left Lydia behind. I left my Micheal behind, I ran away from my best friend and my brother and nearly had to bury them both.

Micheal wasn't so lucky. Paula I haven't heard from in years.

Dead or alive, I buried my parents in Gotham long ago.

I was young. Capricious. Anxious. I never meant for any of this to happen. I never meant to hurt anyone. But consequences are like parents, as James always says, you don't get to choose them. But you have to live with them. I've lived with mine for a long, long time.

You have no choice but to live with them. No one ever said you have to accept them.

And no matter how much time passes you still find yourself sweating and sleepless in the middle of the night, shaking him awake and asking him for forgiveness.

But James is James. I never had to. I never will.

_Once upon a time,_ he tells a story beside me in the dark as his fingers soothe my skin, _once upon a time it was no one's fault. There was no one to blame. _

It was never easy growing up in Gotham…and Fear Night only made it worse. When the good die young and all life is meaningless, adolescence in Gotham City dissolved into sex, money, drugs and fame. I came of age in an era of violent vigilantism, secret sins and unforeseeable consequences where even the good and great were poised to fall. There were no certainties, no gods, no justice. No heroes, only idols. And amidst it all the Joker carved a religion of chaos against the bleak and bloodied background.

Dent is dead. The Batman has fallen. Now comes the winter of our discontent.


	2. Chapter 2

So.

I don't know if you've noticed yet, but literature kind of has this thing for star-crossed lovers. It's almost as if there's no insurmountable obstacles to two people screwing then the romance is dead. And—likely as not—they are too. Then there's that whole "courtly love" thing, you know, pining after some soul mate from afar, never to touch and contaminate this purity with base physical impulses. For a species—even a planet—evolved to be obsessed with sex and reproduction, on a whole we've got a pretty damned messed up idea of what it is.

If you're like me when I was that age, it all felt either too forced or just plain morbid. What was the point? Meet someone, "fall in love", get married and get fat and have kids and be unhappy and try your damnedest to lie to yourself and everyone around you? Everywhere we looked adults called what they had happiness. On the television, the radio, in bookshops and school yards they lied to us. They lied to themselves. In the end, their lies would poison everything.

The summer before sixth grade, my classmates were all grasping for adulthood and adolescence. Carpe diem. Couldn't wait to get started. Sure there were the kids still playing with dolls and stuff, but then there were the periods and surprise pregnancies and the sudden suffocating pressure to conform. While they were busy deliberating who and what they wanted to be when they grew up and developing eating disorders, I kept questioning whether I wanted to at all.

It all seemed pretty vague and miserable to me. I knew in a couple weeks to months the inevitable would happen, my body would start spurting the stupid hormones, I'd get the growth spurt and the breasts (and apparently pubic hair—I had no idea girls got it back then. I shared a room with my sister Paula, and she shaved) and the joy of my doctor's visits demanding "are you sexually active?" It was my brain. My body. My life and choices that would be altered. Puberty was like this horrific monster hanging over us that no adults ever seemed to be bothered enough about.

I felt alone. Afraid. Meaningless. Felt like that guy in Ridley Scott's Alien walking around with that monster inside him just waiting to burst out in a gore of menstrual blood and perky pre-teen breasts. It was like one day I would wake up, and I wouldn't be Brisby Spickett anymore. There'd be another girl calling herself that, she wouldn't look like me, she wouldn't think like me, she wouldn't be anything like me…yet everybody just couldn't wait to meet her.

But I wouldn't be her. The Brisby I was—the Brisby I wanted to stay—she would just stop. She'd be dead. And no one would care. They'd all be too excited about the new one. They'd take her out and buy her make-up and bras and manicures and talk about boys while I'd be an old toy, a worn pair of sneakers on Christmas morning, completely forgotten. Unused, unwanted, unmissed.

My mom wanted to see "her little baby all grown up", and dreamed of weddings and college and grandkids. Wanted a life for me that she should have had herself. Micheal wanted it to all be over so he wouldn't have to worry about "beating the boys off you", and Paula made it pretty clear I wouldn't be worth condescending to until I did. And my dad? If dad said anything at all it was about not being able to wait to have the house to himself.

I guess if you're going to be unfulfilled and miserable, it was better to do it alone where the pretense wouldn't be so intrusive.

And—

_…__And. _

And what if I _did_ grow up. What if I _did_ fall in love. What if it was wonderful. What if being in love was everything the stories and songs all said it was. What if it was possible you could fall in love and _could stay in love_, and what if I lost him. What if he _died. _What if he or I didn't ever do anything to deserve it but _he just died anyway._ Like Thomas and Martha Wayne. Like Fear Night. Like all those people on the news, like Lydia's sister Shannon who never made it home…

Shannon was good. Shannon followed all the rules. She was the best big sister in the whole wide world but _she died anyways._ If anyone who ever lived deserved to live at all it was Shannon Faucett who never hurt a soul and volunteered her time and wanted to grow up and be a nurse in Africa and help small children and always smiled at you like she couldn't imagine being any happier than she was right now and the person she wanted to be with the most at any given second was everyone and anyone but especially just you. In a world that made sense this story should be Shannon's, but that year our stories stopped making sense. Our heroes and protagonists got struck down without warning leaving just the supporting cast, and our Author was absent if existent at all. We lost our mythos. We lost our morality. Many of us even lost ourselves. We weren't old enough to remember 9/11…and Fear Night? Fear Night shattered us.

Early deaths, divorces, break-ups, hook-ups and unhappy marriages. Which would be worse, have sex and get punished? Stay a pining, poetic virgin? Or to love and laugh and follow all the rules but still wake up one morning all alone? Was there even a point in going on at all in a world where Shannon Faucett's died? We went to bed one night and when the sun rose, we found the re-assuring rug of karma had been pulled from beneath our feet and even the adults had been rendered speechless, and what words and comforts they awkwardly offered us were lies. We'd been lied to, all our lives, and knowing it we'd never ever feel safe again. I was only twelve at the time, but already I found all the wars had been fought, all Gods equally impotent, and all faith in the institution utterly shaken. The adults before us had centuries to clean up this mess but in the end it was the same shit, just the same shit every day in a never-ending cycle. People got hurt. People died.

People like Shannon.

To twelve year-old me, the thought of growing up in Gotham City was like facing the neon trails of headlights the wrong way on an interstate, hurtling forward at alarming speed. I just wanted brakes. The ability to steer. Wanted time to stop, to think, to figure it all out on my own terms. Wanted someone out there in the fast-approaching abyss of unknown and awkward to say it was okay, it was scary, it sucked, it felt like being swallowed whole…I needed someone to say they'd come out a survivor, they'd left that screaming cyclone the same as they'd gone in.

That summer I found James.


	3. Chapter 3

If you'd asked any girl in Gotham that year how the man they'd marry would look like you'd receive only two answers: Bruce Wayne, or the Batman.

The prodigal son. The boy who was once thought dead returned to riches and splendor to take his rightful place of the Wayne Empire's heir. Bruce was back in town with a media frenzy only made worse after Fear Night as the world struggled to make sense of the senseless. The old stories with their morals and allegory would no longer suffice, and so entertainment became the opiate of the masses. I had the opportunity to meet him once, and looking back now I know why it is they loved him so.

Bruce Wayne had that Gotham savoir faire. Handsome, rich, debonair, and a welcome distraction from things like that War in the Middle East and Plummeting Stock Prices and Struggling to Keep up with Mortgage Payments and Collapsing Housing Markets and Hunger, Homelessness, but especially Terrorism. Soldiers died on far off sands or came home to commit suicide, but Bruce Wayne's Gotham was to us like Gatsby's glorious summer in West Egg, transitory, fleeting, a collapsing dream of an imagined and nostalgic past. We craved his tempestuous, tantrum-riddled life, despised him for his riches yet clawed after them greedily, longed for the carefree, speak-easy charisma that carried him. From the papers and television and the gossip blogs you'd never have guessed he was the loneliest man in the world.

Bruce Wayne was one of the Old Gods, unloving, unholy, wholly self-absorbed and deaf to the pleas and cries of the populace. Yet one wave his his benevolent hand could forgive him a century of ineptitude and ignorance.

The Batman was our modern savior, the Anti-Hero, shrouded in mystery and intrigue. Women swooned, male strippers assumed the stage-name, underground graffiti exploded and the world only watched, disgusted, at our increasing antics and ritualized worship of this strange idol. He came in the cover of darkness with the guise of a fascist and we sexualized him and analyzed him until the myth and mystique of the Batman could no longer be separated from his factual apparition.

If you had asked me then, at age twelve, how the man I'd marry when I grew up would look like the answer would've been quite different. I didn't know if I wanted to grow up, and I certainly was never getting married. I saw the strain the bonds of marriage placed on my own mother, saw the happiness that other couples had that she claimed for herself and decided they all must be liars. I saw romance on television and thought it was something imaginary, or something that happened to other people but certainly not us—I don't think in those first twelve years of my life I ever even saw my parents kiss. So I didn't understand what it was that drove my classmates and the upperclassmen to don make-up and frilly clothes, to skip class to kiss and screw in cars. The hormones responsible for turning my brain and sex organs into an emotionally and physically mature human being hadn't been excreted yet. I existed in that awkward, gawky place of pre-adolescence, no longer a child but certainly not yet an adult, awaiting with dread the day my body decided to hijack me and my life with it. At the end of fifth grade, I had some classmates with periods and bras, and those still obsessed with Pollypockets. Most of us had never kissed or held hands, yet some of us had already misplaced virginities.

The innocence and incandescence of childhood were gone. Fear Night and Gotham City replaced them with a hedonistic obsession with sex, money, and transitory fame.

I was stuck in the eye of a hurricane, thoughts of suicide, a mind full of day dreams, and a waking world of slow horrors. In my heart I wanted the world to be so big, but every day it seemed to shrink around us in a suffocating heat that drove us deeper into the madding crowd.


	4. Chapter 4

I once saw an old painting in an alleyway, its canvas pitted with mold and moisture, the portrait of a woman forever ruined. She was still pretty and poignant and I wanted to take it home, but Paula said it was already ruined. So she sat, day after day becoming shabbier and shabbier until finally the rain and mold and rats ate through her smile and she was gone.

Lydia reminded me of that picture. Beautiful and sad all at once. She had a smile that used to be brilliant but now couldn't be born by anyone. She once told me she wasn't supposed to be happy anymore, that her mother screamed at her for laughing even months after Shannon's funeral. Like many families they'd buried an empty casket, and inside of it laid all their hopes, their happiness, and thoughts of their still-living daughter. All the next year I watched as her family fell apart, watched as she fell apart, and I never so much as reached out my hand to help her. Our parents had been friends, Shannon and Paula had been best friends, but after the funeral it all just stopped. I left her alone, the world left her behind, like an oil painting in the garbage used to being fawned over and admired. Once the world had called her a treasure, then one day it passed her by.

As the year wore on I recognized my friend less and less. On the last day of school we'd tried to talk, but it wasn't the same. It felt suffocated and forced. Lydia couldn't be happy anymore, just a bitter black hole that sucked the life out of everything around her, overshadowed by the shade of a sister that Gotham loved more. The Lydia I knew was immortalized on a forgotten canvas, and the girl before me grew like the portrait of Dorian Grey into a twisted, soulless shape beyond recognition.

I was too young. Didn't understand. We'd been friends for forever, because Paula and Shannon and our parents had already been friends even before we were born. But that was crumbling, falling, and the foundations of our friendship had never been as deep as either of us had thought. That winter she pierced her nose with a needle, said the cuts on her arms were from a cat, stopped eating because she wasn't hungry and I drank up all her untruths and I believed her. I was too naive to know differently. My friend was hurting, cursing at the wounding world as only an adolescent could, yet all I heard was silence.

The school yard was teeming with screaming kids and celebration as we made our way to the bus stop. The sun was bright, the clouds like wisps of cotton above us, the sparse grass green, and she scowled at it all with a palpable resentment that clung to her like cigarette ash. Urban decay, smog, and gum-stained concrete surrounded us and she strode across the skin of the world like she was queen of the dismal, the damned, and mundane.

"So I'll see you?" We'd been—well, I'd been—discussing plans for our usual summer.

"Whatever." After Shannon died, whatever had quickly became Lydia's favorite word. It meant hello, goodbye, fuck off, leave me alone. But I was still so naive. And desperate. Lydia Faucett was my only friend.

It shames me to say I don't think I was ever even that for her.

"Okay?" I asked her.

"Okay." Fuck off. Fuck you.

It wasn't for another two years I learned she'd fucked Micheal instead. She fucked both of them. She fucked us all.


End file.
